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The iJamming! Weekly Download: The Tripwire Podcast 023

It’s been two months since this online magazine’s last Podcast, but well worth the wait. This Tripwire show is Podcasting as it should be – solid blocks of new indie music followed by brief, informed commentary. On your iPod, you’ll notice the Podcast broken up into chapters, allowing you to skip or repeat tracks and commentary throughout the 82 minutes. Given that those tracks include unedited quality MP3s of new singles by Bloc Party, Arcade Fire, Youth Group and Clinic, along with newbies like Half Cousin and Field Music, you can be excused for wondering why you need buy new music any more.

But The Tripwire wants you to support the artists it enthuses about. Listen to the Podcast on iTunes (rather than your iPod) and you’ll notice in the artwork panel not just the relevant album sleeve emerge alongside each track, but a link that will take you to that act’s home page. For San Fran’s Seventeen Evergreen, host Robert English notes during his bulked-up back announcement that you can follow a link in your iTunes to the song’s video. And of Arcade Fire, he laments that the same world wide web which enables a new act to prosper can also harm them when a new album is leaked online ahead of release date.

The Tripwire properly supports new music. Any old Podcast can feature Bloc Party and Arcade Fire; it takes true Anglophiles to bring us a demo by Sunderland/Newcastle’s A Woman Of No Importance. I can also thank the aptly-named English and his editorial chums/pals for introducing me to Hackney’s New Rhodes, Orkney’s The Dead Bodies, Australia’s The Temper Trap, the Little Rock collective Bear Colony, and Washington State’s The Trucks, whose ‘Titties’ sounds alarmingly like potty-mouthed electro rapper Peaches.

If you don’t have an iPod with which to enjoy The Tripwire podcast and if, after visiting The Trucks’ website, you agree with me that ‘Titties’ sounds too much like Peaches for comfort, then take advantage of The Trucks’ remix competition, redesign it to sound more like someone else (The Stranglers?) and win yourself an iPod Nano in the process. What a wonderful world this can be.

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Copyright Tony Fletcher 2000-2012. Other than short excerpts under standards of fair use for purpose of review or reference, content may not be copied and republished without written permission of author.